January 25, 2008

New techniques eliminate the need of Anti-Rejection Drugs During Transplantaion

Till date during organ transplantations, when an organ is donated by a genetically unrelated donor (or simply who is not a family member), the chances of the organ being accepted by the body are very less, as our body never allows any foreign substance into it.To overcome this problem, scientists and researches developed drugs that suppresses the patient's immune system (body's defence system), due to which the organ forcefully gets entry into the body.Although by this method, the organ performs the required task, but more adverse side effects arises. As the immunity suppressor drugs weakens the body's defence mechanism, many infectious pathogens gets opportunity to enter and affect the body.

Finally, here comes a mechanism which will even eliminate the need of these anti-rejection drugs."There's a reason to hope that these patients will be off drugs for the rest of their lives", said Dr. David Sachs of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who led the research published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

The treatment mainly confuses the body, by adding some extra elements in the body's defence system itself.Initially some immune suppressing drugs are given to the patient and then bone marrow from the same donor who gave the organ is also transplanted into the patients body. The stem cells from the marrow reprogram the body by allowing new immune cells to grow that dont try to attack the donated organ.

In one experiment, four of five kidney recipients were off immune-suppressing medicines up to five years later.`

But as this all is still in its initial steps, so the results doesnt mean that it is safe for current transplant patients to go off their medicines, if the process is not done with proper knowledge it may be proven fatal too...

Its not a joke folks !!!You can really climb skyscrapers...just wait another 3 years, to have a dream come true experience.

You DON'T require any spider bites this time...

At the University of California, researchers are developing a unique kind of gloves called as "Gecko-Gloves", or simply calling "The Spider man gloves".

The research team has reported that they have solved the mystery of - How lizards manage to stick without getting stuck...The main idea behind this project is that, although conventional tapes stick when pressed against a surface, but this only adheres when it slips. This makes it a directional adhesive, which allows a real gecko to run up walls while rapidly attaching & detaching its toes.

"I think gecko-gloves for spiderman type climbing could be made in three to five years". Telegraph quoted professor Ron Fearing of the University of California, Berkely, as saying.

The gecko-inspired smart adhesive, which is dry, uses hard microscopic plastic fibres of polypropylene that mimic this effect. As far as spidey effects are concerned then one has to get some more similar pads for knees, chest etc. And ofcourse an athletic body is a must...so start working on your body, i think 3 years is enough for you.

Still want more ?

Then check this out :

The Web Blaster comes complete with a Spiderman glove, shooting mechanism and web fluid refills. To shoot webs at your foes simply press the button in the palm of you hand, list to the electronic web-slingling sound and watch as your sworn enemy is covered in silly string unbreakable spider webs, cool!

The web blaster can be yours (or more appropriately your child’s) from Amazon for $19.99.

January 20, 2008

With the movement of just your fingers, you can easily control the cursor. The 800 DPI Optical finger mouse from Logisys virtually works on any surface (say good bye to mouse pad) except the reflective glass surface - common with any optical mouse.

Point the cursor with your index finger while your thumb to control the left button ( lower button), right button ( upper button) and scroll wheel.

Strap it on your finger and start using it.

BUT, it is still available in corded model ( USB Mouse) , hope we could see it in a bluetooth model soon !

Devil Mountain Software, which earlier in the week claimed Windows Vista SP1 was no faster than the original, repeated some of the same tests on the release candidate of Windows XP SP3, the service pack recently issued to about 15,000 testers.

"We were pleasantly surprised to discover that Windows XP SP3 delivers a measurable performance boost to this aging desktop OS," said Craig Barth, Devil Mountain's chief technology officer, in a post to a company blog Friday.

Devil Mountain ran its OfficeBench suite of performance benchmarks on a laptop equipped with Office 2007, Microsoft's latest application suite. The notebook -- the same unit used in the Vista/Vista SP1 tests earlier -- featured a 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 1GB of memory. The results reported a 10% speed increase under XP SP3 when compared to SP2, the service pack released in 2004.

"Since SP3 was supposed to be mostly a bug-fix/patch consolidation release, the unexpected speed boost comes as a nice bonus," Barth said. "In fact, XP SP3 is shaping up to be a 'must-have' update for the majority of users who are still running Redmond's not-so-latest and greatest desktop OS."

According to the Office performance benchmarks, Windows XP SP3 is also considerably faster than Vista SP1.

"None of this bodes well for Vista, which is now more than two times slower than the most current builds of its older sibling," said Barth.

While Microsoft was not available for comment over the weekend about XP's performance, it defended Vista SP1 after Devil Mountain's first round of tests. "We appreciate the excitement to evaluate Windows Vista SP1 as soon as possible. However, the service pack is still in the development phase and will undergo several changes before being released," a spokeswoman said in an e-mail.

Recently, Forrester Research said that XP remained Vista's biggest rival, and cited survey data that showed American and European businesses would delay Vista deployment, in part because of application incompatibility issues with the new OS. "That's causing a lot of XP shops to take a wait-and-see approach to Vista," said Forrester analyst Benjamin Gray two weeks ago.

NO - I am NOT talking about any Sequel of the Famous Film Series Jurassic Park

This time its going to be build physically - a massive project in Dubai, consisting of Life Size Dinosaurs, which will be open for visitors.

The only difference when compared to the movie is the replacement of those genetically produced dinosaurs with electrically controlled robotic Dinosaurs.But the interesting part is that these are going to look exactly similar to the real ones.Even their breath is gonna stink - eew !

The pterodactyls are designed to swoop, huge amphibians will swim through lakes and herds of diplodocus are set to roam the landscape.

This all is set to open in Dubai in 2010.The Natural History Museum has been approached to make dinosaurs because of its ground breaking work in animatronics.Director Audrey O'Connell said, "We want to create a hybrid of a theme park and a museum that will allow people to experience a Jurassic - era habitat".

The first fully automatic mobile phone system, called MTA (Mobile Telephone system A), was developed by Ericsson and commercially released in Sweden in 1956. This was the first system that didn't require any kind of manual control, but had the disadvantage of a phone weight of 40 kg (90 lb). MTB, an upgraded version with transistors, weighing 9 kg (20 lb), was introduced in 1965 and used dual-tone multi-frequency signaling. It had 150 customers in the beginning and 600 when it shut down in 1983.

The handsets division of Ericsson was given a fresh start in the form of a joint venture with Sony called Sony Ericsson in 2001.In the 1990s, 'second generation' (2G) mobile phone systems such as GSM, IS-136 ("TDMA"), iDEN and IS-95 ("CDMA") began to be introduced. The first digital cellular phone call was made in the United States in 1990, in 1991 the first GSM network (Radiolinja) opened in Finland. 2-G phone systems were characterized by digital circuit switched transmission and the introduction of advanced and fast phone to network signaling.

A Little Handy

Dr. Martin Cooper ofMotorola, made the first US analogue mobile phone call on a larger prototype model in 1973.

The first handheld mobile phone to become commercially available to the US market was the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, which received approval in 1983.

THIS was the First Generation Mobile Phone (1G - Mobile ).

Second Generation Mobile Phones ( 2G )

In the 1990s, 'second generation' (2G) mobile phone systems such as GSM, IS-136 ("TDMA"), iDEN and IS-95 ("CDMA") began to be introduced. The first digital cellular phone call was made in the United States in 1990, in 1991 the first GSM network (Radiolinja) opened in Finland. 2-G phone systems were characterized by digital circuit switched transmission and the introduction of advanced and fast phone to network signaling.

Third Generation Mobile Phones ( 3G )

The most significant feature of 3G mobile technology is that it supports greater numbers of voice and data customers — especially in urban areas — and higher data rates at lower incremental cost than 2G.

It also allows the transmission of 384 kbit/s for mobile systems and 2 Mb/s for stationary systems. 3G users are expected to have greater capacity and better spectrum efficiency, which allows them to access global roaming between different 3G networks

3G handsets usually have cameras, music players, video players, contactless smartcards for payment functions (wallet phones), Web browsers, email clients and more. This shows that the UMTS system is based on layered services and future applications can be supported without too much impact to the underlying radio access network.

Fourth Generation Mobile Phones ( 4G )

4G is being developed to accommodate the quality of service (QoS) and rate requirements set by forthcoming applications like wireless broadband access, Multimedia Messaging Service, video chat, mobile TV, High definition TV content, Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB), minimal service like voice and data, and other streaming services for "anytime-anywhere".

4G will be a fully IP-based integrated system. This will be achieved after wired and wireless technologies converge and will be capable of providing 100 Mbit/s and 1 Gbit/s speeds both indoors and outdoors, with premium quality and high security.

The first ever computer invented occupied a complete room, weighed some around 30 tons and used electricity sufficient to run a small town, but now a more advanced computer hardly requires your lap / palm (laptops/Palmtops)!!!

But when we talk about supercomputers …they still need a complete room space to work with some gigs of Ram and some tera/petabytes of HDD.

But here comes the day when it even these giants are going to become portable in the form of usual laptops, and who knows in few years(or may be months) they’ll be in our palms too !!!

IBM…has taken its first and a powerful step towards this goal.

The basic difference between a normal home PC and a supercomputer is the rate of flow of information within the system. And to remove this barrier a remedy was always there: - Substitute light connectivity for copper (or any metal) connections. The use of optical instead of electrical signals for transferring data results in significant performance enhancements since light signals carry more information – faster and cheaper.

The problem so far has been of size, because devices for converting electricity to pulses of light were simply too big to integrate optimally inside a chip. But now IBM has succeeded in building a converter which is far smaller than any previously demonstrated, thus promising to shrink the size of present day electronic chips and simultaneously increasing their speed to hundreds of times.

But why do we need all this? Well the answer is are you satisfied with your PC, or do you want to meet its DADDY. Besides speed it saves a lot of power as it consumes just ONE-TENTH of the power as compared to the present personal computers. And most importantly, portable supercomputers would mean research institutions could have easier access to their data, with minimum investment of money and time.

The new USB 3.0 standard (specification) will be released in the first half of 2008, Intel has revealed at its Developer Forum.

The present day USB 2.0 delivers a transfer speed of upto 480 Mbps, whereas USB 3.0 promises 10 times of this speed taking the transfer rate to 4.8 Gbps.Moreover, It will be backwards-compatible with USB 2.0, which is backwards-compatible with the first USB 1.1 definition.

Intel stated that the USB 3.0 specification would be optimized for low power and improved protocol efficiency. The USB 3.0 ports and cabling will be designed with both copper and optical cable capabilities, meaning even higher speeds will be possible in the future. "USB 3.0 is the next logical step for the PC's most popular wired connectivity," said Jeff Ravencraft, technology strategist with Intel and president of the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF). "The digital era requires high-speed performance and reliable connectivity to move the enormous amounts of digital content now present in everyday life. USB 3.0 will meet this challenge while maintaining the ease-of-use experience that users have come to love and expect from any USB technology."

He further said : "If the USB 3.0 Promoter’s group meets its objective of spec completion in the first half of 2008, then we should see the first silicon solutions on the market in 2009, followed by end products in late 2009 or early 2010."

A 75 year old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden has been thrust into the IT history books - with the world's fastest internet connection.

Sigbritt Löthberg's, who had never had a computer until now, is no ordinary 75 year old. She is the mother of Swedish internet legend Peter Löthberg who, along with Karlstad Stadsnät, the local council's network arm, has arranged the connection.

Sigbritt will now be able to enjoy 1,500 high definition HDTV channels simultaneously. Or, if there is nothing worth watching there, she will be able to download a full high definition DVD in just two seconds.

The secret behind Sigbritt's ultra-fast connection is a new modulation technique which allows data to be transferred directly between two routers up to 2,000 kilometres apart, with no intermediary transponders.

According to Karlstad Stadsnät the distance, in theory, is unlimited - there is no data loss as long as the fibre is in place.

"I want to show that there are other methods than the old fashioned ways such as copper wires and radio, which lack the possibilities that fibre has," said Peter Löthberg, who now works at Cisco.

Cisco contributed to the project but the point, said Hafsteinn Jonsson, is that fibre technology makes such high speed connections technically and commercially viable.

"The most difficult part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt's PC," said Jonsson.

Regular Readers

What They Say...

Divya Sai is the ingenious webmaster of Bloggerstop.Net. Divya is extremely patient, knowledgeable and responsive... Bloggerstop.net has an abundance of articles on creating widgets, templates, hacks and ways to make your blog search engine friendly.- Stacey @Pets With AllergiesI stumbled onto a great site. Sai, over at Bloggerstop.net has helped me tremendously and with great patience...for any and all questions regarding computer issues. And again, THANK YOU Sai.- Cheryl @Cmash Loves To Read